Mob rule

Friday

Mar 27, 2009 at 2:00 AM

Why don’t we just kill all AIG employees?

Steve Tefft

Why don’t we just kill all AIG employees?

Seriously. Let’s find all who are currently on the payroll of the ailing insurer, march them out of their offices and line them up in front of an old brick wall somewhere. Let’s offer them a final cigarette (if any of them dare partake in that taboo), blindfold them and shoot them. But first, we should allow people who blame AIG for our economic crisis a chance to bounce a few rocks off the heads of the condemned … then we’ll shoot them. The rock-throwers should include all those who would never, ever waste money as profligately as AIG did. Let Congress, those stalwarts of fiduciary fitness, cast the first stones. Think I’m kidding? This is where we’re headed, at least rhetorically. I have two thoughts concerning the AIG bonuses. First, they’re disgusting. Second, the reaction to them is way, way over the top, and probably calculated. The New York Times’ Joe Nocera put it well: “Can we all just calm down a little?” That a private company taking public money rewards employees who helped create the need forpublic money in the first place is indeed shocking, angering, brazen, ungrateful, and dozens of other adjectives one could think of. The situation calls for measured acrimony and thoughtful action. Instead, we’ve got an angry mob mentality that is spinning dangerously out of control. AIG executives are getting death threats. Busloads of “activists” are conducting hate tours of the executives’ neighborhoods. Representative Barney Frank, whose behavior vis-à-vis Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had as much to do with the genesis of our crisis as any other single act, is demanding the names of bonus recipients. Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), whose next deep thought will be his first, thinks the bonus-takers should apologize and then commit suicide. Grassley later said he was joking. Ha ha. And the House, which careened off the tracks of common sense months ago, passed a bill to confiscate nearly all of the AIG bonuses. Never mind that the measure is almost certainly unconstitutional and an extremely dangerous precedent; whipping the mob into a higher frenzy is more important than mere fealty to our constitution. Congressional outrage at AIG is rank hypocrisy. The very bonuses they’re railing about were protected by a special clause inserted into the $787 million dollar stimulus package approved in February by our representatives. That means Congress either a) knew about the clause and didn’t care about the bonuses until now, or b) didn’t read its own stimulus bill. Incidentally, Senator Chris Dodd, who authored the bonus clause, was the second largest recipient of AIG political contributions last year. The first? He sits in the White House. What we’re seeing is faux populism, a modern twist on the worst of Louisiana’s Huey (“every man a king”) Long; a cheap play upon the emotions of recession-weary Americans whose latent resentments of the well-off are being fanned like an arsonist’s fire. President Obama is implicit in this rush to demonize – if not directly, then indirectly by failing to call off the dogs. A conspiracy theorist might think the president is using the AIG bonus matter as a classic “straw man” diversion to siphon attention from his real agenda ­– redrawing America as a European-style social democracy, and in so doing, running up a gargantuan national debt that future generations could never hope to pay off. But Obama couldn’t, and wouldn't, be that cynical or manipulative. Would he?